Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday April 28, 2012 @08:26AM
from the when-that's-the-good-news dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that when a Delta Airlines flight touched down at Midway International Airport in Chicago, the passengers looked out the window to see the jet surrounded by fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. Health officials came through the door wearing facemasks and other protective gear. As it turns out the bedbugs that infest hotels appear to be the source of red marks on a 50-year old Minnesota woman that prompted health officials to quarantine the jet for fear they were dealing with something much more serious: monkeypox. Lise Sievers called her mother during a layover in Detroit and told her that one of the children she visited and is trying to adopt in Uganda had some pus-filled red bumps and also mentioned she had some small bumps of her own, a rash that she suspected was the handiwork of bedbugs. Those two very different bumps — one with pus, one without — got jumbled up in Siever's mother's mind, and she called a hospital near her Indiana home to ask about treatment for her daughter. 'She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them,' says Roger Sievers. 'She was looking for some general advice.' Health officials feared they were looking for monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease mostly in found in central and western Africa. After the passengers waited on the plane for a couple of hours, officials brought good news. 'They came back down and told my mom it was bed bug bites and they started releasing people.'"

The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.

However, if you had been lessed obsessed about artificially propped-up status and wages, and instead worked on the ground for a year or two in, say, Sierra Leone, or Congo, empirical evidence down there would tell you it's NOT rare, it IS highly contagious. But *fatalities* ARE rare.

Bedbugs used to be a thing of the past thanks to the wide spread use of DDT in the 50s. Their reemergence was only a matter of time now that it was banned. But, New York is a melting pot for people all over the world, and someone brought the bugs with them. Eventually they spread like wildfire and the rest they say is history.